Premature parting for twin peas in a pod

Australia's Waughs were Test cricket's most supremely accomplished twins, of course, but they were conspicuously distinguishable in phizzog, style and character. As schoolboys we giggled over the wild hand-me-down tales of such identical kin as Dudley and Sydney Rippon of Somerset, and Jack and Billy Denton of Northants, twins who had driven to distraction a legion of umpires, scorers, captains and team-mates.

My generation could actually gape in person at cricket's most fabled two peas from a pod, and even differentiate between them - if only fleetingly - once they had signed either EA or AV in our autograph books in their precisely similar handwriting. Even half a century on, when I'd take one of them, as England's chairman of selectors, out to lunch, I was never absolutely certain he had not sent his brother instead.

Sadly, five weeks short of its 88-year span, the inseparable partnership of Surrey's Bedser twins was broken last week with Eric's death. Alas, poor Alec. The obits stuck mostly to the cricket (Eric's 14,000 runs and 800 wickets, and Sir Alec's 1,900 wickets, 236 of them for England) and ignored the quite remarkable, fraternally telepathic, togetherness. Tweedle-A and Tweedle-E.

One winter I flew back from the West Indies with Alec. At Heathrow, Eric was waiting. They'd been a month or two apart, but were dressed identically, uncannily right down to the very same choice of their many club ties. "I lost half a stone in the heat out there," said Alec. "Funny, so did I here at home," said Eric. In sympathy, as it were.

The Surrey committee's feudal habit was to present its retiring pros with 20 £1 premium bonds. Alec left The Oval in 1960, Eric in 1961. Their bonds lay in two envelopes, forgotten in a drawer at their Woking home for 31 years - till on precisely the very same January day in 1992 separate letters arrived, each enclosing a £500 prize. We asked a premium bonds boffin to calculate the odds against such an occurrence. "Let's start," he said, "at 20 billion to one."

At their beloved golf, for 70 years the Bedsers' handicap fluctuated in exact uniformity, and at a charity day at Worplesdon once, with identical No2 woods they drove off, each with precisely similar mannerisms at their address on the first tee, and each with identical, low-slung beefy swings - and 150 yards away in the middle of the fairway their two balls ended up actually kissing each other, eggs in the same cuddly nest.

A friend claimed to tell them apart: "Eric always starts a sentence, Alec always finishes it." I put it to the test. He was wrong. I think. Or was he? Another said: "No probs, Alec's right shoulder is slightly higher, and Eric's got a minute birthmark at the top of his forehead". Then he hesitated and cursed, "dammit, or is it the other way round?"

Pinetree, the purveyor of pain

Asked in New Zealand to select a fantasy World XV to play Mars and they'd lock you up for either sacrilege or insanity if you failed to include Colin Meads in the pack. Phenomenally strong and smoulderingly committed, at 6ft 4in and 16¼st - coincidentally, Muhammad Ali's exact fighting weight for the "Thrilla in Manila" - all through the 60s I fancy Meads was a far nastier opponent on the field than the self-styled "greatest" ever was in the ring. The All Blacks' saintly demigod is 70 on Saturday. I wonder if it's the notable birthday which might mellow the old cove down on the farm at Te Kuiti.

The man they called "Pinetree" was probably the most rumbustiously accomplished forward I ever saw play. He was also the scariest; because, certainly, he was the dirtiest. Meads would not live with the cameras' scrutiny today; citing committees would have collective seizures.

Dismemberment was even an option for a "Piney" on the rampage. At Sydney in 1962, Meads dragged that wonderful Wallaby scrum-half Ken Catchpole by one leg from a ruck, ignoring his victim's hair-curling shrieks of pain as his groin muscles were twisted and turned to such shreds that he never played rugby again. At Twickenham a year later, half the West Stand winced as Meads's right-cross smithereened Mike Campbell-Lamerton's cheekbone; in the 1969 Wales Test at Christchurch another vindictive haymaker caused Jeff Young's jaw to be wired up for weeks.

On Meads' retirement in 1972, he was made the foundation member of the NZ Sports Hall of Fame - and Kiwi sportswriting eminence Sir Terry McLean shocked the nation by unequivocally coming clean: "Great? Sort of. Greatest? No. The feeling is of pity that some of our rugby not only tolerates but applauds dangerous play which can result in injuries which turn men, especially young men, into cripples."

After the Lions' fourth Test in Auckland in 1966, when another white-knuckled pearler from Meads had laid out Newport's Puck of a sprite Dai Watkins (5ft 6in and 10st), we asked the big fellow to talk us through it. "Aw, Jeez, gents, not guilty. It's an open- and-shut case of self-defence," said a pained Pinetree.